Monthly Archives: March 2017

For those who are not aware, v3.0 of NativeScript is the next major version that will be released. It has been being worked on for several months now as it has parts of it have been completely rewritten to enhance speed of the framework in a number of areas. Some parts of it have undergone radical changes in design, and as such will require changes to plugins to make them compatible.

Unfortunately these changes are a breaking change and will mess up the plugins for a while...

Some pre-release information has trickled out and as such the plugin developers needs to be made aware of these changes, so we can start getting a jump on these changes...

The biggest issue is any plugins that deals with any properties, or stylers has been completely changed. These plugins will HAVE to be changed to support 3.0. This means your plugin will no longer be NS <= 2.5 compatible, these are BREAKING changes.

Plugin Sites and the Package.json

As an aside if your plugin doesn't have any breaking changes and can continue to work fine in all versions of NS; then I am asking you to add a new flag to your package.json file to flag that this plugin is 3.0 compatible but doesn't require 3.0.

The additional "plugin" structure is being introduced to try and capture the data that has been missing from the plugin infrastructure. At this moment each item is totally optional. However, this will allow the plugin sites to categories and filter the plugins based on criteria's that are important to subsets of the users using the plugin sites. Please see: http://fluentreports.com/blog/?p=489 for more details on the new "plugin" structure proposal.

Back to the breaking Changes

The first resource is that some of the NativeScript team produced a video last week https://youtu.be/bwO3cYPb4zQ which will give a decent overview of the changes.

The developers working on the 3.0 project gave a run down of the changes and how they benefit us and/or what changes we need to be concerned about.

They used this document in the above video; but since they only covered an overview and this documents has all the nitty-gritty details.

For this to be a smooth transition I really strongly encourage you on the "core3" attribute be used if you are not just bumping your platforms to 3.0.0. I will be automatically filtering out plugins that I believe are only 2.0 for 2.0 mode and 3.0 for 3.0 mode. So having things tagged correctly will help the end users have a much more painless transition.

Some of you might not be aware but I wrote the plugins.nativescript.rocks. I also helped write the plugins.nativescript.org site (if something doesn't work on plugins.nativescript.org; please blame my cohorts in crime, Nathan Walker and George Edwards. I had NOTHING to do with any bugs! 😛 )

Well, with the new upcoming changes in 3.0 and some data that we have been unable to determine I have decided to request that the plugin authors add a little bit more metadata to the package.json file that comes with the plugin.

This tells nativescript which version of NativeScript runttimes are supported. This allows the TNS command line to throw and error/warning if you are not using the proper versions. This is useful information as this tells us what platforms are supported. However, this fails when people (like me) write dummy wrappers to support the plugin not crashing on the other platform. On the plugins site it will say this plugin supports both Android and iOS, but in all reality the plugin only really supports iOS, and actually doesn't really do anything on Android. I would like to have the plugins site actually reflect this reality rather than you downloading a plugin you thing works on Android and it turns out it doesn't.

In addition since Angular was introduced to the eco-system, there are a large number of plugins that actually do NOT work with NAN (NativeScript Angular) code. And even some that don't work with PAN (Plain Awesome NativeScript) code. In addition in the future we might get other frameworks supported like VueJS (VAN?), etc.

So I would like to start capturing the data so that we can do these additional cool things. And so I am proposing the following additional OPTIONAL meta data to be added.

will be assumed to be false, unless Angular is detected in the Keywords/name/description.

pan = Plain Awesome NativeScript

Will be assumed to be true.

core3 = Supports NS Core Modules 3.

Will be assumed FALSE if platforms.ios/.android < 3
Will be assumed TRUE if platforms.ios/andorid >= 3.

wrapper = Using a dummy wrapper

Will default to false, use "ios" or "android" to signify platform which is using a wrapper.

category

This is the category to put the plugin in. Valid categories currently are: "Interface", "Processing", "Templates", "Developer", "Utilities"

I am up for other category suggestions. But at this point these are the primary categories that I use on plugins.nativescript.rocks.

Please note each key is optional; however, your plugin will get extra points for having an category key. And you will LOSE points if we detect a plugin is using a wrapper and you haven't tagged it, as this is a issue the plugin users really hate seeing faulty data about the plugins support.

I would recommend plugin authors start adding this to any releases of there plugins so that we can capture the data. This will become critical with the 3.0 release as a large chunk of plugins are not going to be compatible between NS 2 & NS 3.